News

Wasting food

America's food-waste problem is getting worse, The Economist reports. Since reliable data are scarce, U.S. researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Maryland decided to look at the problem by calculating the calorific consumption of the population and comparing that figure with recorded levels of food production, modified for imports and exports. They found that the average American wastes 1,400 kilocalories a day - overall, about 40 per cent of the country's food supply a year, up from 28 per cent in 1974.

Bear hurt badly

A 25-year-old man was just moments away from death as he hung in the jaws of a bear he tried to have a picnic with in Switzerland's Bern Park zoo, The Daily Telegraph reported last week. "But in the end, it was the bear [named Finn] who ended up fighting for his life after police shot it in order to save the life of the uninvited intruder into his enclosure." They shot the bear with a fragmentation bullet, which splinters inside the target. Finn is critically ill but veterinarians can't operate because of the number of splinters. The intruder suffered severe head and leg wounds but he is out of danger. There has been an outpouring of public sympathy after the incident - for the bear.

Crocodile attack

Two Bangladeshi men have been sentenced to two years in jail with hard labour for severely beating a pregnant crocodile at an Islamic shrine, BBC News reports. The crocodile, named Pipil, was badly injured and lost one eye after the men hit her with bamboo sticks. The attack took place in April at Khan Jahan Ali shrine, 135 kilometres southwest of the capital Dhaka. The holy site has about two dozen crocodiles living in a big pond where pilgrims can feed and watch them. The men convicted were among a group of people who collect money from visitors by exhibiting the creatures. The group is known to beat the crocodiles if they do not respond to their calls; according to local authorities, five crocs in the past 10 years have died because of such mistreatment.

Need we stretch?

The latest science, Gretchen Reynolds writes for The New York Times, "suggests that extremely loose muscles and tendons are generally unnecessary (unless you aspire to join a gymnastics squad), may be undesirable and are, for the most part, unachievable anyway. 'To a large degree, flexibility is genetic,' says Dr. Malachy McHugh, the director of research for the Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York and an expert on flexibility. You're born stretchy or not. 'Some small portion' of each person's flexibility 'is adaptable,' McHugh adds, 'but it takes a long time and a lot of work to get even that small adaptation. It's a bit depressing, really.' "

Art and your brain

"Patterns in brain activity can be used to determine whether someone is looking at a surrealist landscape by Salvador Dali or the cubist lines of Pablo Picasso," New Scientist magazine reports. "Yukiyasu Kamitani of ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, and colleagues showed 12 students dozens of Picassos and Dalis while scanning their brains using functional MRI. A program then identified patterns in activity that were unique to each artist. When fed brain scans produced by students looking at fresh paintings by the same artists, the program correctly identified the painter better than chance alone: It was correct 83 per cent of the time among the six students who were art majors and 62 per cent of the time among the others."

Got unwanted gifts?

Last month, The Guardian reported that two British amateur divers had found a hoard of ecclesiastical gold and silver on the riverbed below Durham Cathedral. On 200 dives, Gary and Trevor Bankhead uncovered 32 objects given as gifts to the late Michael Ramsey, who was bishop of Durham in the 1950s. These included everything from gold medals to a silver trowel. How the hoard ended up in the river is a mystery. One theory is that it was the haul from a burglary, but a friend, the Very Rev. Victor Stock, said it's more likely the brilliant but eccentric clergyman dropped them in himself, at a loss for what else to do with them when he retired. He and his wife didn't want the objects, and they couldn't sell or give them away, for fear of offending the donors. "He used to go for a walk by the river every day, whatever the weather," Rev. Stock told the newspaper. "I think it's entirely plausible to imagine him making up a little packet, and quietly dropping it into the water. He would have thought that would be the end of it, nobody would ever see them again."

Thought du jour

"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries."

- A.A. Milne